Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Barack Obama’s Vetting Through Association

Bill Ayers is shown in 1982 with wife Bernardine Dohrn and their son, Zayd Dohrn, then 4. Image Credit: By David Handschuh -- Associated Press

Barack Obama’s Vetting Through Association

Most people who have a complaint about the Junior Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, say that he has not been around long enough to have built a record ... upon which one can judge the underpinnings of the decision-making of the man.

Information has surfaced recently about the friends and associations of this Senator and Democrat candidate for President of the United States. This information should cause one to pause and reflect on the fact some vetting has indeed taken place.

This vetting through association should not be confused with “Guilt Through Association” because this focus does not have to take into account what Barack Obama actually thinks … it has everything to do with what these people, their background and what they think, and further, what they think about Barack Obama.

This vetting is in the form of the judgments of the people who know him best. They have worked with him, taught him, served on committees with him. They embrace him as their choice for the leader of the “Free World”.

This story involves two Chicagoans, former Weather Underground terrorist leaders Bernardine Dohrn and her husband, William Ayers, both Obama supporters who blessed his initial foray into politics. Last week, the unrepentant Ayers became a flash point in Obama's debate with Hillary Clinton.

"And what they [Weather Underground] did was set bombs and in some instances people died," said Clinton, sweetly playing the white terrorist card. "I know Sen. Obama is a good man and I respect him greatly, but I think this is an issue that certainly the Republicans will be raising.”

And why shouldn't they?----But no association is above question for a candidate, whether Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Illinois political fixer Tony Rezko, or Ayers and Dohrn.----Broadway Baby was implicated in an investigation of a series of violent armed robberies in New York—netting more than $2 million over a two-year span—committed by former Black Panthers and Weather Underground members in the early '80s.

Their aim? Global revolution, naturally. They needed cash, but the rich white parents weren't in a giving mood. So their privileged offspring grabbed guns, pointed them at the faces of the working man and, sometimes, they pulled the trigger.

At Broadway Baby, customers often paid by check and used driver's licenses for identification. On Dec. 28, 1979, information from two customer files was used to apply for two driver's licenses at the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles. The fraudulent licenses were used to rent getaway cars for the gang.

Investigators tracked the identities on two licenses for the getaway cars. The names belonged to women who had shopped at Broadway Baby in December 1979. But they weren't robbers.

And who was the manager of Broadway Baby during that period of the customer ID theft?

Dohrn, the future wife of Ayers, identified by investigators as taking customer information from one, and possibly both, of the women shoppers. Dohrn was never charged in that case.

Dohrn and Ayers had been running for some 11 years, fleeing federal charges that they instigated riots in Chicago in 1969.

They finally came in out of the cold in 1980, but the New York gang continued its spree, ending in the bloody 1981 robbery in Rockland County that left a Brinks security guard and two police officers dead.

The federal charges from the riots were finally dropped because the FBI used illegal wiretaps. But the local charge of aggravated assault stuck to Dohrn. She pleaded guilty to two counts, receiving a $1,500 fine and no jail time

In 1982, Dohrn was brought before a federal grand jury investigating radical conspiracies linked to the New York robberies. She refused to cooperate or to provide a signature sought by FBI handwriting analysts. Dohrn was held in contempt of the grand jury and imprisoned for seven months.

A few years later, Ayers got his job as a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. And Dohrn was employed at the Children and Family Justice Center affiliated with Northwestern University's School of Law.

I've always been fascinated as to how the radical underground stop running and get jobs in academia. Is there a Terrorist Patronage Office for Rich White People? And how did a convicted Dohrn get hired to teach at a law school?Reference Here>>

In the 1960s, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn saw themselves as urban guerrillas who just might be able to overthrow the U.S. government and force an end to the Vietnam War. They were members of the Weather Underground, a radical offshoot of the antiwar movement, who went into hiding for a decade after a bomb accidentally exploded, killing three members of the group.

Nearly 30 years after surrendering to police, Ayers and Dohrn, both in their 60s, are tenured university professors whose work on school reform and juvenile justice have won them bipartisan respect.

Ayers is an informal adviser to Mayor Richard M. Daley and has been awarded more than $50 million in charitable grants for his promotion of small schools as a solution to a crisis in education. Dohrn lectures widely on children's law and serves on a variety of boards and committees. Together, they have raised three boys in the intellectual haven of Hyde Park, where Sen. Barack Obama is a neighbor.

For months, their connection to the Democratic presidential candidate -- they hosted a gathering for him in 1995 when he first ran for the state Senate and later contributed $200 to his reelection campaign -- has been a source of growing anger among conservatives.----"I don't condone what he did 40 years ago, but I remember that period well," said Daley, an Obama supporter whose father, Richard J. Daley, was a favorite target of the antiwar movement when he was mayor in the '60s. "It was a difficult time, but those days are long over. I believe we have too many challenges in Chicago and our country to keep refighting 40-year-old battles."

Their pasts have hardly escaped Ayers and Dohrn. After Sept. 11, 2001, alumni at the universities where the two teach protested their presence and said the couple were unrepentant.----This is a community that has regularly elected former Black Panther Bobby Rush (D) to Congress and mostly sees Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., as the onetime heart of an established African American church with thousands of members.----Ayers and Dohrn did not return calls or e-mails seeking comment. In an April 6 posting on his blog, Ayers described his reaction to his intermittent celebrity as conservative pundits hammered him for his Weather Underground past and his comment in a New York Times profile, published by coincidence on Sept. 11, 2001, that he did not regret his militant tactics.

"Day in and day out," he wrote, "I go about my business, I hang out with my kids and my grandchildren, take care of the elders, I go to work, I teach and I write, I organize and I participate in the never-ending effort to build a powerful movement for peace and social justice."

The Weather Underground claimed responsibility for roughly a dozen bombings. Targets included the Pentagon, the Capitol, police stations, banks and courthouses. Beyond the three conspirators killed in 1970 when a bomb exploded prematurely, no one was injured in a campaign defined by what one critic has called "immensely bad ideas and dreadful tactics."----Dohrn pleaded guilty to a state charge and later served seven months for refusing to give a handwriting sample to federal authorities. She told a reporter that the FBI already had a sample, and that she considered grand juries "illegal and coercive."----When Obama was asked about Ayers during Wednesday's debate, he described him as "a guy who lives in my neighborhood." He said he does not exchange ideas with him "on a regular basis."

The two men served for three years on the board of the Woods Fund, an anti-poverty group. The board, which Obama has since left, was small and collegial, said chair Laura Washington, who served with them. It met four times a year for a half-day, mostly to approve grants, she said. The atmosphere was "friendly but businesslike."----Under fire on Wednesday, Obama questioned the relevance of Ayers's past to his candidacy: "The notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn't make much sense."Reference Here>>

Both Ayers and Dohrn were recently recorded making statements that would cause the average person to ask … “What is former about the nature of the radical statements made and recorded just five months ago in November 2007?”

Sample Transcript Excerpts:

Ayers and Dohrn address a Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) reunion in November 2007 – a reunion of a radical, liberal, socialist, communist, terrorist, Anti-American action group formed in the 1960’s.

William Ayers, on America - "Empire resurrected, and unapologetic, war without end. An undefined enemy that is supposed to be a rallying point for a new kind of energized jingoistic patriotism. Unprecedented and unapologetic military expansion, white supremacy changing its form … but essentially intact.

Attacks on women, and girls --- violent attacks. Growing surveillance in every sphere of our lives, on and on and on, the targeting of gay and lesbian people as a kind of a scapegoating gesture, to keep our minds off of what is really happening."

Bernadine Dohrn on working politically in America - At the same 2007 SDS reunion, Dohrn quotes Martin Luther King, Jr., referring to the US government as "the greatest purveyor of violence" in the world. She says she believes this sentiment to be true today. She tells the audience that living in America constitutes living in "the belly of the beast" and "the heart of the monster."

On one hand, Obama pals around with terrorists. On the other hand, Hillary pals around with James Carville. Advantage: Obama.

Asked why he would be friends with the likes of Weatherman Bill Ayers, Obama said: "The notion that ... me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values doesn't make much sense."

That's a slick answer -- even "Clintonian"! -- but the problem is, Ayers and his Weatherman wife, Bernadine Dohrn, won't stop boasting about their days as Weathermen.

It's not simply that they haven't repented. To the contrary, those were their glory days! And Ayers isn't just someone who lives in the neighborhood: He and Dohrn were there at the inception of Obama's political career, hosting a fundraiser for Obama at their home back in 1995.----At one rally, Dohrn famously praised the Manson family for murdering Sharon Tate and others, shouting: "Dig it. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into a victim's stomach! Wild!"

In a better country, just saying "Dig it!" in public would get you 20 years in the slammer.----At other rallies, Dohrn said, "Bring the revolution home, kill your parents -- that's where it's at."----So in addition to being stupid and violent, the Weathermen were also incompetent terrorists.

Would that Timothy McVeigh had been so inept!

If he [Timothy McVeigh] had only said he bombed the building in Oklahoma City to protest American "imperialism," McVeigh, too, could be teaching at Northwestern University, sitting on a board with and holding fundraisers for presidential candidate B. Hussein Obama.Reference Here>>

The views held as expressed through the statements and actions of Ayers and Dohrn, are NOT the views of America held here, at MAXINE ... are these views, yours?

One last addendum:

Guy Benson is the young producer that has assisted in helping Hugh Hewitt on the Ayers/Dohrn collateral materials. Guy dug up the 2007 tape of William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn speaking at an SDS reunion, audio of which debuted on the Sandy Rios Show which Guy produces, then on my show, Hannity & Colmes, Laura Ingraham.

We, at MAXINE, are dumbfound struck at how these people have not evolved one inch in a life and world that has advanced and evolved forty years from when these folks gained their fame.

In the video above, Bill Ayers wears a FREE MINDS t-shirt, yet his mind has been LOCKED DOWN in the same mode for over forty years!

In those same forty years, for example, many of us have changed, or modified our opinions due to the temperance of time and reflection ... or just plain temperance. Again, these folks have not - - - and they think that Barack Obama is the perfect person ... their marxist based thinking process for the person ... to be the leader of the free world.

No comments:

Dedicated to highlight the efforts of the Democrat Political Party in the United States to relive and reinstate the radical, liberal values and executive successes marked by the one-term Presidency of James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr., the 39th President of the United States from 1977 to 1981.

The Democrat Party is responsible, once again, at placing a naive neophyte socialist with little executive experience (even less than Carter) into the Presidency of the United States with the election of the Junior Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama as its 44th President. A gentleman who professes that when he first assumes power as the President of the United States, he will begin the withdrawal of our military from Iraq immediately, and Afghanistan (this has not yet happened), and meet the leaders of rouge nations throughout the world … Without Pre-Condition (first indication of this desire was shown by granting his first media interview from the Whitehouse to the Muslim TV network Al Arabiya).

Welcome to Carter's Second Term (now in its second stint) ... is way more dangerous and corrupt than we expected. Oh, and the damage to the economy due to Government spending, expansion of the money supply through Quantitative Easing, and the implementation of the Affordable Care Act/ObamaCare (which has yet to get underway in earnest due to the unconstitutional practice of executive order waivers) will show its damage to this country for decades to come.